The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  There was considerable argument about whether the Waitabits would ever be capable of a short rocket-flight even with the aid of automatic, fast-functioning controls. Majority opinion was against it but all agreed that in any event none would live to see it.

  Then Leigh announced, “An Earth Ambassador is to be left here if anyone wants the job.” He looked them over, seeking signs of interest.

  “There’s little point in planting anybody on this planet,” someone objected.

  “Like most alien people, the Waitabits have not developed along paths identical with our own,” Leigh explained. “We’re way ahead of them, know thousands of things that they don’t, including many they’ll never learn. By the same token they’ve picked up a few secrets we’ve missed. For instance, they’ve types of engines and batteries we’d like to know more about. They may have further items not apparent in this first superficial look-over. And there’s no telling what they’ve got worked out theoretically. If there’s one lesson we’ve learned in the cosmos it’s that of never despising an alien culture. A species too big to learn soon goes small.”

  “So?”

  “So somebody’s got to take on the formidable task of systematically milking them of everything worth a hoot. That’s why we are where we are: the knowledge of creation is all around and we get it and apply it.”

  “It’s been one time and again on other worlds,” agreed the objector. “But this is Eterna, a zombie-inhabited sphere where the clock ticks about once an hour. Any Earthman marooned in this place wouldn’t have enough time if he lived to be a hundred.”

  “You’re right,” Leigh told him. “Therefore this ambassadorial post will be strictly an hereditary one. Whoever takes it will have to import a bride, marry, raise kids, hand the grief to them upon his deathbed. It may last through six generations or more. There is no other way.” He let them stew that a while before he asked, “Any takers?”

  Silence.

  “You’ll be lonely except for company provided by occasional ships but contact will be maintained and the power and strength of Terra will be behind you. Speak up!”

  Nobody responded.

  Leigh consulted his watch. “I’ll give you two hours to think it over. After that, we blow. Any candidate will find me in the cabin.”

  At zero-hour the Thunderer flamed free, leaving no representative of the world. Some day there would be one, no doubt of that. Some day a willing hermit would take up residence for keeps. Among the men of Terra an oddity or a martyr could always be found.

  But the time wasn’t yet. On Eterna the time never was quite yet.

  The pale pink planet that held Sector Four H.Q. had grown to a large disc before Pascoe saw fit to remark on Leigh’s meditative attitude.

  “Seven weeks along the return run and you’re still broody. Anyone would think you hated to leave that place. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I told you before. They make me feel apprehensive.”

  “That’s illogical,” Pascoe declared. “Admittedly we cannot handle the slowest crawlers in existence. But what of it? All we need do is drop them and forget them.”

  “We can drop them, as you say. Forgetting them is something else. They have a special meaning that I don’t like.”

  “Be more explicit,” Pascoe suggested.

  “All right, I will. Earth has had dozens of major wars in the far past. Some were caused by greed, ambition, fear, envy, desire to save face or downright stupidity. But there were some caused by sheer altruism.”

  “Huh?”

  “Some,” Leigh went doggedly on, “were brought about by the unhappy fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Big, fast-moving nations tried to lug small, slower-moving ones up to their own superior pace. Sometimes the slow-movers couldn’t make it, resented being forced to try, started shooting to defend their right to mooch. See what I mean?”

  “I see the lesson but not the point of it,” said Pascoe. “The Waitabits couldn’t kill a lame dog. Besides, nobody is chivvying them.”

  “I’m not considering that aspect at all.”

  “Which one then?”

  “Earth had a problem never properly recognized. If it had been recognized, it wouldn’t have caused wars.”

  “What problem?”

  “That of pace-rate,” said Leigh. “Previously it has never loomed large enough for us to see it as it really is. The difference between fast and slow was always sufficiently small to escape us.” He pointed through the port at the reef of stars lying like sparkling dust against the dark. “And now we know that out there is the same thing enormously magnified. We know that included among the numberless and everlasting problems of the cosmos is that of pace-rate boosted to formidable proportions.”

  Pascoe thought it over. “I’ll give you that. I couldn’t argue it because it has become self-evident. Sooner or later we’ll encounter it again and again. It’s bound to happen somewhere else eventually.”

  “Hence my heebies,” said Leigh.

  “You scare yourself to your heart’s content,” Pascoe advised. “I’m not worrying. It’s no hair off my chest. Why should I care if some loony scout discovers life forms even slower than the Waitabits? They mean nothing whatever in my young life.”

  “Does he have to find them slower?” Leigh inquired.

  Pascoe stared at him. “What are you getting at?”

  “There’s a pace-rate problem, as you’ve agreed. Turn it upside-down and take another look at it. What’s going to happen if we come up against a life form twenty times faster than ourselves? A life form that views us much as we viewed the Waitabits?”

  Giving it a couple of minutes, Pascoe wiped his forehead and said, unconvincingly, “Impossible!”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “Because we’d have met them long before now. They’d have got to us first.”

  “What, if they’ve a hundred times farther to come? Or if they’re a young species one-tenth our age but already nearly level with us?”

  “Look here,” said Pascoe, taking on the same expression as the other had worn for weeks, “there are troubles enough without you going out of your way to invent more.”

  Nevertheless, when the ship landed he was still mulling every possible aspect of the matter and liking it less every minute.

  A Sector Four official entered the cabin bearing a wad of documents.

  “Lieutenant Vaughan, at your service, commodore,” he enthused. “I trust you have had a pleasant and profitable run.”

  “It could have been worse,” Leigh responded.

  Radiating good will, Vaughan went on, “We’ve had a signal from Markham at Assignment Office on Terra. He wants you to check equipment, refuel and go take a look at Binty.”

  “What name?” interjected Pascoe.

  “Binty.”

  “Heaven preserve us! Binty!” He sat down hard, stared at the wall.

  “Binty!” He played with his fingers, voiced it a third time. For some reason best known to himself he was hypnotized by Binty. Then in tones of deep suspicion he asked, “Who reported it?”

  “Really, I don’t know. But it ought to say here.” Vaughan obligingly sought through his papers. “Yes, it does say. Fellow named Archibald Boydell.”

  “I knew it,” yelped Pascoe. “I resign. I resign forthwith.”

  “You’ve resigned forthwith at least twenty times in the last eight years,” Leigh reminded.

  “I mean it this time.”

  “You’ve said that, too.” Leigh sighed.

  Pascoe waved his hands around. “Now try to calm yourself and look at this sensibly. What space-outfit which is sane and wearing brown boots would take off for a dump with a name like Binty?”

  “We would,” said Leigh. He waited for blood pressure to lower, then finished, “Wouldn’t we?”

  Slumping into his seat Pascoe glowered at him for five minutes before he said, “I suppose so. God help me, I must be weak.” A little glassy-eyed, he shifted atten
tion to Vaughan. “Name it again in case I didn’t hear right.”

  “Binty,” said Vaughan, unctuously apologetic. “He has coded it 0/0.9/E5 which indicates the presence of an intelligent but backward life form.”

  “Does he make any remark about the place?”

  “One word,” informed Vaughan, consulting the papers again. “Ugh!”

  Pascoe shuddered.

  MUSIC FOR TIME TRAVELLERS

  Jason Heller

  To listen to music is to travel through time.

  When we listen to music, we’re being asked to exist – for the length of a performance or recording – not only elsewhere, but elsewhen. That travel through time doesn’t have to be profound. It can be barely perceptible. Often songwriters wish to shift us just a few moments of either side of today, more of a puddle-jump than a voyage. “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,” sings Paul McCartney in “Yesterday” by The Beatles. “Will you still love me tomorrow?” wonder The Shirelles in their girl-group anthem of the same name. These songs aren’t mere functions of memory or premonition. Both of them – and thousands more like them – jar us from the here-and-now. Tethered only loosely to the present, we become uprooted in time.

  Space, too, becomes a variable. That’s only natural, considering the interrelation of space and time, not to mention the way music seeks to transport us. There’s a third axis, though: sound. Far more than language alone, the confluence of lyrics and music is able to strike a resonant cluster of notes, a chord of timelessness. Or timefulness.

  H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine was published in 1895, the same year the seven-inch record was introduced to music consumers and phonograph parlors. Each in their own way, these innovative watersheds augured a new way of seeing time in the 20th century: as a substance that could be defined, contained, and even manipulated – a notion that was soon manifested in everything from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity to the forty-hour workweek. By midcentury, the seven-inch single had become the staple of commercial music recordings. Its technical limitation was a temporal one, too: The further a seven-inch record exceeded four minutes per side, the more compressed its single, spiral groove became – and the more distorted it sounded. It’s hard to picture a more vivid analogy for time travel.

  Upon its advent in 1948, the twelve-inch long-playing record (or LP) began overtaking its seven-inch counterpart. In a conspicuously consumerist, postwar world, more meant better, music included. Rising parallel to this was the notion of leisure time, which in turn allowed society to indulge, more than ever before, its imagination – nostalgia for the past, a mixture of hope and fear about the future. The former became the fodder of literary fantasy; the latter fueled science fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954 and ’55, half a decade after George Orwell’s 1984.

  Throughout the rest of the century, those two works would inspire dozens of popular songs, from Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” to David Bowie’s “1984”. Neither The Lord of the Rings nor 1984 is about time travel per se, but they helped codify the polyglot genre of speculative fiction, one that gazed imaginatively both backward and forward. This paradox – along with the breakneck acceleration of atomic and space-travel technologies throughout the Cold War – presented mankind with a previously unthinkable dilemma: Did they live in the past, the present, or the future?

  Sun Ra didn’t answer any questions, but he posed some astounding ones. In the 1950s, the LP format – and its elongation of songtime – allowed recording artists to expand the spectrum of their vision. Through this new aural telescope, Sun Ra ogled at the cosmos. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, the pianist and bandleader claimed that, early in his career, he had travelled astrally to Saturn; his obsession with Ancient Egypt reflected an equal affinity for time travel. Drawing anachronistically from both the far future and the remote past, Blount crafted an elaborate, pharaoh-from-the-stars stage persona – complete with dazzling costumes – that made him appear as a wanderer through spacetime, stranded here and now only long enough to make music.

  And make music he did. Launching the movement of Afrofuturism, he used big-band bebop and abstract, chilling modulations of sound to turn his rotating LPs into virtual flying saucers. His 1960 song “Music from the World Tomorrow” – recorded with his Myth Science Arkestra – is just one of the many dense, discordant compositions that Sun Ra used to free his music, and his listeners, from the chains of spacetime.

  Throughout the rest of the ’60s, popular music became a vehicle for increasingly ambitious sounds and ideas. But it wasn’t until the psychedelic movement blossomed in the last half of the decade that Sun Ra’s music-as-time-travel concept began to take root. One of the most otherworldly practitioners of psychedelic rock, the Texan bard Roky Erickson, led his band The 13th Floor Elevators through a subdued yet trippy track titled “She Lives (in a Time of Her Own)”. Released in 1967 as the psychedelic zeitgeist reached its cusp, the song hints at the way psychotropic substances can alter the way one’s consciousness flows through the chronological continuum. Erikson fixates on an ethereal young woman who seems to traverse time according to her own velocity and rhythm.

  Psychedelia crossed over with folk as the ’60s oozed into the ’70s, softening the sharper edges of such transcendental sounds. Accordingly, folk artists picked up on time travel. In 1969, the duo of Zager and Evans had a fluke hit with the eerie single “In the Year 2525”, which skips like a stone across a still pond, revealing various dystopian scenarios between 2525 and the mind-numbingly distant 9595. It’s nowhere near as far-off as the year 802,701, which is where the Time Traveller of Wells’ The Time Machine finds himself. But the song is clearly inspired by Wells, pessimism and all. Less famously but more potently, English folkie Mick Softley released a song called “Time Machine” in 1970. “Who were you in 2000 B.C.?” Softley asks before demanding, “Who will you be in 5000 A.D.?” By grafting the more traditional sounds of folk music to the science-fictional possibilities of time travel, these artists became the first to traffic openly in temporal paradox and anachronism – elements that would surface more frequently as music pushed further into the future.

  Progressive rock, as its name implies, sought the probe tomorrow with a restlessness that bordered on vengeance. Hard rock rose to satisfy the demands of the masses – Grand Funk Railroad’s 1969 song “Time Machine” is an ode to sex with groupies, nothing deeper – but progressive rock took that heaviness to a cerebral extreme. Rejecting the short, crude, simple formula of the conventional pop-rock song, the genre of “prog” – as it became both affectionately and derogatorily known – infused jazz and classical structures into rock. Not only did this allow prog musicians to distend and distort the skin of popular music to a previously unimaginable degree, it encouraged the tackling of headier subject matter such as time travel. With twenty-minute-plus songs that routinely took up entire sides of LPs, prog bands dabbled routinely in science fiction and fantasy. Despite the stereotype, though, prog’s conceptual palette was much broader, and time travel didn’t factor significantly into it – at least not literally. Rather than singing about journeys to the future, prog artists tended to act like they were already there.

  Curiously, time travel as a lyrical theme is most prominent in the early ’70s in the overlap of prog and hard rock. Uriah Heep and Hawkwind were two British bands who could only marginally be considered prog; in fact, they had more in common with the emerging sound of heavy metal. Yet in 1972, each band immortalized itself in the annals of time-travel music: Uriah Heep with “Traveller in Time” and Hawkwind with “Silver Machine”. (Three years later, Hawkwind would release an album titled Warrior on the Edge of Time, based on the books of science-fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock and his time-bending Eternal Champion.) More startlingly, the German jazz-rock outfit Dzyan – associated with the movement known as Krautrock, which would birth the futuristic group Kraftwerk – released an instrumental record in 1973 titled Time M
achine. Free of vocals or lyrics, it instead uses intricate, radically shifting tempos and time signatures as metaphors for time travel.

  Some of the strains of progressivism reached the mainstream in the ’70s – and many of those bands are now considered staples of classic rock. Many such acts managed to smuggle an incredible amount of weirdness onto the airwaves, though. Time travel included. Although the lyrics of Steely Dan’s 1974 hit “Pretzel Logic” are as arch and abstruse as most of their work, songwriter Donald Fagen revealed years later that the song was, in its own cryptic way, about time travel. In 1975, two of classic rock’s biggest bands, Led Zeppelin and Queen, touched on the time-travel theme: Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” contains the mysticism-laden lines, “I am a traveler of both time and space,” while Queen’s “’39” – sung by guitarist and future PhD in astrophysics Brian May – relates the tale of space explorers who, much to their alarm, return to Earth a century after they depart due to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Also in 1975, a scrappy, lurid stage production called The Rocky Horror Picture Show made it to the big screen. With it came its indelibly glammed-up theme song, “Time Warp”. Although neither the film nor the song deal explicitly with time travel, their grab-bag pastiche of eras and aesthetics took the free-for-all anachronism of the decade and spun it into a catchy, danceable, cult-worthy anthem.

  Things got grimmer in the ’80s. The imminent approach of the year 1984 was an almost oppressive reminder that Orwell’s dystopic predictions half a century earlier had been specious in some ways, prescient in others. The future had arrived, and it was both more boring and more chilling than predicted. Brian Eno, former keyboardist of the temporally unhinged band Roxy Music, got a jump on the ’80s with 1977 album Before and After Science. As if its title was enough of an indication that Eno viewed time from multiple angles at once, many of the album’s songs brush on time travel – including “Here He Comes”, in which Eno sings of “the boy who tried to vanish to the future or the past”.